Written by Jospeh Elbaz

Recently in AP Psychology, we, the students, have been going through some psychology videos to wrap up the year in good spirits. What we did not expect was to learn more about the Stanford Prison Experiment, which we believed to be over-exaggerated by psychologists. The experiment was conducted by a teacher on students and included randomly picking guards and prisoners from the students in order to see if the position they were placed in would affect their personality. Well, it did, and the result was a horrific but fascinating experiment that led to the verbal, physical, and mental abuse of the prisoners by the guards, who were their own classmates. 

To go deeper, the experiment was replicated in a movie, and the movie started with the head teacher starting the experiment in exchange for money for whoever signed up. After people signed up, the experiment started, and people were placed as guards and prisoners. Due to its violent nature, the experiment ended after the guards asked the prisoners to do horrific things to each other, but initially, it wasn’t that bad. The escalation from being moral people to immoral “creatures” made psychologists really question how innocent people were, but more importantly, the effects they could have on normal human beings who committed no crimes. This question is universal, and is a very difficult question to answer if you take it in historical situations.

This question leads to questions about the morality of the Nazis, who like these normal college students, abused and mentally deprived innocent people of their physical and emotional rights. It also leads to the same question for many groups of people in power, and how they could lead to becoming abusive of that power and harming innocent people and citizens. 

What we can learn from this is the importance of staying true to yourself and not abusing the power you are given. Yes, what happened in the experiment was extreme, but it can apply to each and every one of us as human beings with a soul and animalistic drive as well. While this was partially graphic, it taught us as Valley Torah students these lessons, along with psychological concepts that can be used in our future college careers and everyday lives.